What might be called the Enlightenment project of modern social theory, the urge to explain the world so as to facilitate control, guide action and promote progressive change, has over the last few decades of the twentieth century been fundamentally called into question by what may be broadly labelled postmodernism. The grand ‘totalising’ explanatory narratives of the human sciences have been accused of ‘violently appropriating’ reality; the comfortable divisions of politics and power between those who have and those who don't, and between those with good or God on their side and their reactionary Others, have been declared to be simplistic and naive; and the yearning for the social construction of a better society has faltered in the face of a redeemed and rehabilitated nihilism which has declared the death of the subject. Critics of postmodernism accuse it of superficiality, extreme abstraction, relativism, political conservatism, passivity and fatalism, and decry its implications for the central Enlightenment practices of scientific analysis, transformative political action and intentional human agency. The current functioning of modern societies is integrally bound up with the Enlightenment project; if the latter falters or changes, so must the world as we know it. Social theory thus cannot declare itself immune from the challenge of postmodernism, and is driven to defend itself or perish in the attempt.
One of the most important theorists to be labelled a postmodernist was Michel Foucault (1926–1984). It is not important here whether or not Foucault was a postmodernist—he claimed to be “not up to date” with the term (Raulet 1983: 204)—or even whether it is possible to talk in this way of some kind of unified postmodern theory. What is important are the implications of Foucault's oeuvre for our Enlightenment derived understandings of theory, politics and human subjects, given the extent to which this oeuvre is said to call into question some, if not all, of our most cherished assumptions. Foucault's argument that the Western ‘will to truth’ is an effect of successive but discontinuous epistemes premised upon complex relations of power, stands alongside other arguments that truth is an illusion fostered by Western logocentrism or the metaphysics of presence (Derrida), or . . .